mon petit blogue sans importance...

new nvidia driver in feisty...

I was having some trouble with installing the latest nvidia driver in Feisty; a nifty little program solved it...

First of all, to add to the confusion, there's 2 nvidia drivers in Linux: the 'legacy' and the 'new'. The new one is a new codebase, but dropped support of older cards. You'd normally want to know whether your card is supported by the new by looking it up in nvidia's supported card list.

Trying to install the newer driver from nvidia wouldn't work, because of conflicts with other files (especially the 'restricted kernel modules' package in ubuntu), and i got myself into a bit of a mess of packaging. I got the legacy driver working, but it would freeze on me, and on bootup the ubuntu package version of the module would load.

So i kinda knew what to do, but didn't really want to spend much time chasing down the packages... Enter Envy.

Envy is a really nice little application which will install all necessary packages for full accelerated nvidia support, and handle it in The Right Way: it rebuilds proper debian packages for your system, so that it doesn't end up in a mess (i.e., with files which didn't come from .deb's). I had one slight problem, not really Envy's fault, where it would barf on installing nvidia-kernel-common; it's just that that package was marked for removal, but was installed. Envy would see that it's "wanted" state wasn't 'install', and would try to install it, but it's already installed.... i just used aptitude to force a re-install of the package (to make sure it's fully there), and envy (in text mode in a VT) worked like a charm.

Highly recommended...

by wiswaud on 26 September 2007
Tags: geeky, linux, ubuntu